Endangered Status The San Joaquin Kit Fox, a subspecies of the Kit Fox, is on the U.S. Endangered Species List. It is classified as endangered in California. Before the 1800s, the grasslands of California were second in size only to the Great Plains. Today only 1 percent of the state's native grasslands remains. The San Joaquin Kit Fox is a grassland and scrubland inhabitant and has suffered from the modification of these habitats. Industry, development, and various types of agriculture (in the forms of row crops, orchards, vineyards, and livestock forage) have taken over many of these lands. Suitable remaining habitats are fragmented, meaning the foxes occur in small and isolated populations. These small numbers make the everyday dangers of life in the modern-day wild -- predators, starvation, flooding or drought, poaching, automobiles -- even more significant than they are in a healthy and widespread population.